1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to authoring systems and processes, that is, the use of computer systems and affiliated authoring methods to create information.
2. Description of Related Art
An authoring system is a computer program or a set of computer programs that supports the process of developing information.
A prime objective of any authoring system or process is to provide search and navigation facilities that help readers find topics of interest. Some authoring systems develop these search facilities after the information is authored. For instance, some authoring systems rely on information retrieval techniques that find information based on the occurrence of a word or phrase in the text. They use computer programs to create the search facility after the author has created the body of information. However, readers find it difficult to retrieve information that fits their needs, since the occurrence of words or phrases can appear in many contexts that are not apropos.
Other authoring systems provide the ability for an author to attach keywords or index entries to a piece of information. Readers search for information through index lookup. This technique suffers from two general problems: (1) the author must have the foresight to identify important keywords or index entries, which is not always possible or practical to do; (2) the same keyword or index entry may end up being used to point to pieces of information in differing contexts, making it difficult for readers to find information relevant to their needs.
In general, the first two authoring system types discussed fail to capture important semantic data about the context in which a piece of information is relevant and useful to a reader.
Other online authoring systems make search facility creation an integral part of the authoring process and also capture important semantic data about the reader's context, but fail to provide a consistent, rigorous method that guides the creation of these search facilities. For instance, hypermedia systems often use graphical mapping techniques and linking mechanisms to communicate the structure of the body of the information in the hypermedia database. However, the author is free to use these mapping techniques and links as desired, so the structure of the information revealed to readers is what the author envisioned, not what is obvious or natural to the readers. Additionally, as information changes over time, it becomes enormously difficult to maintain such a structure of information links due to (1) the idiosyncratic nature of the original structure, and (2) the fact that these links are usually integrated into the body of the information itself, making it difficult to locate links that must change. The result for the reader is a phenomenon called "lost in hyperspace," in which the reader becomes disoriented by the structure of the hypermedia, or, worse, encounters information links that fail.
As an information corpus becomes large, several authors are needed to create the information collaboratively. Some authoring systems support such collaboration. For instance, they may allow the sharing of computer files, provide a common view of the work-in-progress, or a consolidated outline, in order to facilitate bringing the entire body of work into a coherent whole. Authors still have difficulty, however, in identifying the overall structure of the information corpus, and information that already exists and could be reused. Often some authoring work must be completed before authors can do the analysis and sometimes information must be reworked as a result.
No system of the prior art known to the inventors helps the author create, as an integral part of the authoring process, search facilities that gather semantic data about reader's context, while at the same time providing a consistent, rigorous method for structuring the information corpus so that authors can constructively collaborate in a nondisruptive manner as an integral part of creating information.